Half an hour later, glancing from a window, she saw them come
from the hothouses and slowly cross the lawn. Arthur had a fine
rose in his buttonhole and looked profoundly thoughtful.



CHAPTER XXI

That morning and noon had been warm, though the stirrings of a
feeble breeze made weather not flagrantly intemperate; but at
about three o'clock in the afternoon there came out of the
southwest a heat like an affliction sent upon an accursed people,
and the air was soon dead of it. Dripping negro ditch-diggers
whooped with satires praising hell and hot weather, as the
tossing shovels flickered up to the street level, where sluggish
male pedestrians carried coats upon hot arms, and fanned
themselves with straw hats, or, remaining covered, wore soaked
handkerchiefs between scalp and straw. Clerks drooped in silent,
big department stores, stenographers in offices kept as close to
electric fans as the intervening bulk of their employers would
let them; guests in hotels left the lobbies and went to lie
unclad upon their beds; while in hospitals the patients murmured
querulously against the heat, and perhaps against some noisy
motorist who strove to feel the air by splitting it, not troubled
by any foreboding that he, too, that hour next week, might need
quiet near a hospital. The "hot spell" was a true spell, one
upon men's spirits; for it was so hot that, in suburban
outskirts, golfers crept slowly back over the low undulations of
their club lands, abandoning their matches and returning to